Last week the Wall Street Journal had a front page article on the net worth of Argentina’s first family since 2003, the year Néstor Kirchner was elected president. Based on financial disclosures with Argentina’s Anti-Corruption Office, the Wall Street Journal reported that, “the couple's net worth rose from $2.5 million to $17.7 million” between 2003 and 2010. Implying that such returns must involve some sort of corruption, the Journal writes, a “lot of people in Argentina want to know where that money came from.”

But there is a serious problem with the way the data are presented here. The Journal is reporting the Kirchners’ net worth in dollars, without adjusting for local inflation. This makes the increase look much bigger than it is, since Argentina had cumulative inflation of nearly 200 percent during these years, according to private estimates.

If the Wall Street Journal had taken inflation into account then the Kirchner’s net worth would have looked quite different. From $2.5 million in 2003, the Kirchners’ real net worth increased to around $6.1 million in 2010.

Simply adjusting for inflation takes away more than three-quarters of the Kirchners’ gain. Should the Journal have known this and adjusted for inflation? The question answers itself. We won’t speculate about anyone’s motives.

Election season officially kicked off in Brazil on July 1st. For the past 7 months, amid wide-scale attacks on her competency -- and against the Brazilian economy -- coming from all sides of the political spectrum in the Anglophone media, President Dilma Rousseff’s poll numbers have remained stable, placing her far ahead of her closest competitor, Senator Aécio Neves of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s PSDB party. IBOPE, Brazil’s most widely-respected polling agency, released numbers last week showing that 38 percent of the Brazilian public intends to vote for Dilma. According to IBOPE this is the same percentage who intended to vote for her in the last poll that was taken immediately before the World Cup, and roughly the same percentage that have supported her all year. Brazil has a multi-party system and she is currently far enough ahead of the remaining candidates that if the election were held tomorrow, she would win in the first round.

According to another recent poll by Datafolha [PDF], Dilma is leading in every region in Brazil. The numbers are close in the wealthy Southeast and South, but her lead climbs in the poorer North and Northeast. In the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest and second most populous region, the percentage of people saying they will vote for her climbs to 55 percent.

João Pedro Stedile, one of the national leaders of the Landless Peasants’ Movement (MST), breaks down the choices that voters have this October in the following manner: “Dilma Rousseff and (third-most-popular candidate) Eduardo Campos represent neo-developmentalism, and Aécio Neves represents neoliberalism.” Neo-developmentalism is a term that people on the Brazilian left use to describe the PT’s modern version of developmentalism. Developmentalism is a Keynesian-influenced economic strategy first developed in the 1940s in the Third World by economists like Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado based on income redistribution through social welfare initiatives, government stimulus for national industrial production and consumption, maintaining key sectors of the economy under control of state companies, and a high minimum wage, that was employed at varying levels by Brazilian president João (Jango) Goulart before the U.S.-supported military coup of 1964. Many people on the Brazilian left apply the “neo” prefix to the 12 years of PT government due to the neoliberal policies initiated in the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration, such as an independent and monetarist Central Bank , that the PT has done little to revert and that blend with traditional developmentalist policies such as large minimum wage hikes, high social spending on welfare programs, maintaining state control over the petroleum industry and mortgage market and subsidizing the construction and manufacturing industries.

[Below is an update to the blog post from July 21 reviewing how Latin America's political leaders responded to Israel's siege on Gaza.]

In a coordinated move on Tuesday (July 29), several Latin American countries recalled their ambassadors to Israel, including El Salvador, Chile, and Peru, the latter two of which made a point to say they had consulted with each other before announcing their decision. This means that five countries so far have recalled their ambassadors over Israel’s attack on Gaza which began July 8th, since Brazil and Ecuador had done so earlier. According to reports from Haaretz, Israel’s Foreign Ministry responded by saying that El Salvador, Peru and Chile were encouraging Hamas by recalling their ambassadors.

El Salvadorannounced its decision to recall its ambassador over “the serious escalation in violence and the realization of indiscriminate bombing from Israel into the Gaza Strip,” which they say has resulted in many deaths, injuries, an exodus of Palestinians fleeing their homes, and serious material damage. Chile recalled its ambassador the same day (July 29), saying that Israel’s military operations “comprise a collective punishment against the civilian population of Palestine in Gaza.” The same statement from Chile condemns rocket launches by Hamas against civilians in Israel, but argues that Israeli operations in Gaza “violate the principle of proportionality in the use of force, an indispensable requirement for the justification of legitimate defense.” The government of Peru recalled its ambassador and said that Israel’s military operations in Gaza “constitute a new and reiterated violation of the basic norms of international humanitarian law.”

In addition, several countries put out new statements reacting to the conflict.

On Monday, I wrote this article looking at the splits within the Obama administration on policy toward Venezuela and how they were manifested in the case of Venezuela’s former military intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal. Carvajal was arrested last Wednesday in the Dutch island of Aruba with the help of the DEA, after he arrived to take up a post as Consular-General at the Venezuelan embassy there. Washington’s attempt to extradite him to the U.S., despite his diplomatic immunity, collapsed on Sunday night when the government of the Netherlands acknowledged Carvajal’s protected diplomatic status.

My argument was that the failed extradition was another attempt by the hard right to blow up diplomatic relations with Venezuela. It failed for the same reason that the previous attempt – the proposed economic sanctions against Venezuela that passed the House of Representatives on May 28, did not become law: President Obama (or whoever is in charge of U.S. foreign policy in the hemisphere), does not want to break diplomatic relations with Venezuela at this point.

Since yesterday, three more developments have followed the failed extradition attempt: first, Senator Bob Corker (the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) released his hold on the sanctions legislation. This was what was officially holding up the sanctions bill in the Senate.

At the same time, a group of senators including Robert Menendez, Bill Nelson, and Marco Rubio, the co-sponsors of the Senate’s version of the proposed Venezuela sanctions bill, released a letter urging Secretary of State John Kerry to “use the existing authorities that the Administration has to levy targeted sanctions against individuals that have been complicit in human rights violations in Venezuela.” This may be a signal from the most militant anti-Venezuela members of the Senate that they have reached some sort of agreement not to push forward with their own sanctions legislation, which the State Department has referred to as “unhelpful,” if the Obama administration utilizes its “existing authorities” to pressure Venezuela.

On July 10th, just two days after Israel launched Operation Protective Edge (the largest attack on Gaza in several years) President Obama released a statement in which he “reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself.” With a death toll now over 550, it is important to look beyond U.S. government sources for information and perspective. Foreign policy among the countries in Latin America conforms to the long-standing, overwhelming international consensus that opposes Israeli aggression and occupation, but it also reflects the region’s “second independence.” Over the last 15 years, most countries in Latin America have increased their ability to pursue a foreign policy agenda separate from the goals of the U.S. State Department. In the vast majority of cases, reactions to the latest hostilities are fundamentally at odds with the U.S. position, but they are also varied: many governments directly criticize Israel, using words like “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” to describe recent events; other official statements limit themselves to calling for a ceasefire and a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Some of the strongest statements were issued by left-leaning governments in South America, including those of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela. The government of Argentina issued a statement “strongly condemn[ing] that Israel -- defying calls by the Security Council, by the Secretary General and by the many voices of the international community – has decided to escalate the crisis by launching a ground offensive.” President Evo Morales of Bolivia announced that he had petitioned the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR) to consider a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for “crimes against humanity” and “genocide.” (Bolivia broke diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 over Israel’s Operation Cast Lead assault on Gaza.) The statement from Brazil reads in part:[1]

The Brazilian Government vehemently condemns the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, with disproportionate use of force, which resulted in more than 230 Palestinians dead, many of them unarmed civilians and children. It equally condemns the firing of rockets and mortars from Gaza into Israel.

As murmurs of U.S. sanctions against Venezuela continue in the aftermath of the protest violence there, researcher Michael McCarthy recently published an article in World Politics Review making some good arguments for why they would be a bad idea. He points out that unilateral sanctions lack regional support, and argues that they would discourage dialogue within Venezuela, would likely be ineffective, and may even harm U.S. interests by scuttling efforts to improve and maintain ties in the region.

McCarthy claims that the push for sanctions represents a “symbolic action” on the part of U.S. officials to communicate “universal support for human rights.” This assumption is pervasive in the mainstream debate about Venezuela sanctions; most commentators assume that the moral basis of imposing sanctions is sound and that the only real debate is on whether they will have the desired practical effect. In this context, some of the most obvious questions are missing from the discussion—in particular: a) what right does the U.S. have to enact coercive, unilateral economic measures against democratically-elected governments (measures that in this case, happen to be nearly universally opposed in the rest of the region and, as a study by pollster Luis Vicente Leon recently presented at the Washington Office on Latin America shows, are overwhelmingly opposed domestically in Venezuela)? And b) what integrity does the U.S. have when it comes to promoting human rights?

Last year, over a thousand unarmed protestors were killed by the U.S.-backed military government of Egypt after an illegal coup overthrew the country’s first democratically-elected president. Among those killed was a young journalist, Ahmed Assem el-Senousy, who had the misfortune to film his own murder at the hands of a government soldier who had spotted his camera. It was a grim echo of an event from another era—in June, 1973, Swedish journalist Leonardo Henrichsen similarly filmed his own death in Chile at the hands of a soldier in an unsuccessful military coup attempt that presaged Augusto Pinochet’s U.S. supported takeover three months later. The State Department claims that U.S. interests always align with democracy and human rights, but it is hard to miss the glaring gap between U.S. rhetoric on these issues and its actions.

In an effort to defend NAFTA and promote similar agreements, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) – Washington’s most influential think tank on international economic policy – had a full day of events yesterday. The program highlighted one of their recent publications [pdf], which seeks “not to rehash old claims that may have been overstated but to clear the air so that the benefits and challenges of trade can be examined in an objective light.” In spite of this disclaimer, the authors grossly overstated the benefits of NAFTA for Mexico, and put forward a number of misleading claims, including a particularly egregious bait-and-switch used to justify a rant against the economic policies of the “Andean-3” aka Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. It is a good example of how ideology can trump facts when it comes to commercial agreements made in Washington.

Earlier this year, CEPR published a paper giving an overview of the Mexican economy in the NAFTA era (“Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years”), so I will focus here on the claims made about Mexico by the PIIE economists. In terms of their bottom line for Mexico, the authors’ findings concur with our conclusions. They say that “Mexican growth in the NAFTA era has been disappointing.” But they also argue that without NAFTA Mexico’s economy would be $170 billion smaller. In other words, they attribute half of Mexico’s (per capita) growth rate to trade in goods and services stimulated by NAFTA (see table below.) Given Mexico’s population (about 118 million), this amounts to a payoff of $1,441 per person, or about $4 per day. In a country where over 27 percent of the population lives on less than $4 a day – in rural areas it is over 48 percent of the population – this would be very significant. In reality, results such as these are produced by economic models that are highly sensitive to parameters which the researchers themselves determine, so it is easy to end up with results that corroborate one’s worldview.

Brazilians may have little love for Germany following Brazil’s historic World Cup loss to the German team Tuesday, but the two countries do have something in common: both have notably been targeted for espionage by the U.S. Yesterday, U.S.-German relations suffered a new blow after Germany announced it was kicking out the CIA station chief over revelations that an employee of the German defense ministry may have passed secrets to the U.S. government. Just last week a member of Germany’s intelligence service was arrested, accused of selling information to the CIA. These scandals follow disclosures made available by Edward Snowden last year of NSA spying on Germans, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Snowden has also revealed extensive political and economic spying by the NSA on Brazil.

Seibert said the request for the CIA official’s departure was made “against the backdrop of the ongoing investigations of the Federal Prosecutor General as well as the questions pending for months about the activities of the US intelligence services in Germany, for which the Lower House of Parliament has also established a parliamentary inquiry committee.”

German officials have also been angered by the revelations of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden of widespread U.S. surveillance in Germany. Among the targets was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, an operation that has since been halted.

Germany is a key partner for U.S. intelligence, and Germany’s allegations and response are no doubt being taken very seriously by both the Obama administration and the media. While the administration clearly hopes it can downplay the scandal -- and while the CIA chooses to Tweet about its robotic fish rather than publicly address the incident (h/t Jonathan Schwarz) -- officials have underscored the gravity of Germany’s response in anonymous comments to press. The AP reported:

Once upon a time, the U.S. government ran a very tight ship at the Organization of American States (OAS), a multilateral institution created by Washington at the start of the Cold War. Though the OAS’ 1948 Charter calls on its members to uphold democracy and respect the principle of non-intervention, for decades the U.S. supported military coups against democratic governments and intervened militarily around the hemisphere without serious opposition from within the regional body. In 1962, the U.S. rallied a majority of member states behind a resolution to suspend Cuba’s membership in the organization and, in the years that followed, was successful in preventing the OAS from taking action against U.S.-backed Latin American dictatorships.

Until recently, the U.S. could systematically rely on the support of a solid group of rightwing allies at the OAS to defend its agenda. But, as a result of the region’s far-reaching political shift to the left, the tide has clearly changed. At the OAS General Assembly in 2009, the U.S. reluctantly joined the rest of the organization’s member countries in lifting the suspension on Cuba’s OAS membership. After Honduras was expelled from the OAS following the June 2009 military coup in Honduras, the majority of members resisted U.S. efforts to restore the country’s membership until June of 2011 when deposed president Manuel Zelaya was finally allowed to return. And in March of 2014, after working with the rightwing government of Panama to force an OAS discussion on opposition protests in Venezuela, the U.S. came up worse than empty handed. Though the U.S. sought a resolution condemning the government of Venezuela and calling for OAS mediation, the member states – minus the U.S., Panama and Canada – backed a resolution that declared “solidarity and support” for Venezuela’s “democratic institutions” and for a process of dialogue already underway.

Last week the U.S. once again stood alone, backed only by the rightwing government of Canada in its opposition to an OAS resolution supporting Argentina in its fight against vulture funds and the ruling of a judge in New York. As Argentina news hounds and CEPR readers are well aware, the U.S. District Judge in New York, Thomas P. Griesa, ruled that Argentina would have to pay two hedge funds, aka vulture funds, the full value of Argentinean debt that the funds had bought for around twenty cents on the dollar. Griesa didn’t seem to care that 93 percent of the holders of the country’s defaulted debt had signed on to restructured debt agreements in 2005 and 2010. In order to enforce his decision, Griesa’s ruling blocked Argentina from paying interest to the holders of the restructured bonds without first paying off the vulture funds.

That seems to be the take-away in the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) front-page story on asylum claims from Honduras, which alternatively ran with the headlines “If You’re Seeking Asylum, It Helps to be Gay” and “The Battle for Gay Asylum: Why Sexual Minorities Have an Inside Track to a U.S. Green Card.” In his news story for WSJ on Honduras, Joel Millman tells a familiar story in which some members of a persecuted minority, namely LGBT Hondurans, can find some relief from their situation thanks to the U.S.’s liberal values and “a growing willingness by Americans to embrace alternative lifestyles,” though they must leave their countries of origin in order to benefit from enlightened asylum laws.

While much of the piece is offensive and inaccurate (Nathaniel Frank has great take-down in Slate that is worth reading), the main problem is that it ignores the most significant event in recent Honduran history: a successful military coup in 2009 that ousted President Manuel Zelaya and triggered a wave of human rights violations and widespread political repression. Attacks on LGBT Honduras increased greatly after the U.S.-supported coup – organizations in Honduras count at least 25 murders of LGBT individuals between 1990 and 2005, but more than 116 murders since 2008 – and so while it might be true that many Hondurans have benefited from successful asylum applications and are now living in the United States, this is clearly not the full story.

The U.S.-backed coup in 2009 sparked a wave of violence against activists, the political opposition, and members of the LGBT community, with as many as 5,000 reports of human rights violations last year in the northern region alone. LGBT activists point out connections between violence perpetrated against them for their identity and for their involvement in resistance to the dictatorship and its successor regime. Indeed, while targeted hate crimes are often not overtly related to targets’ political involvement, LGBT activists note that it’s important to recognize the embedded nature of coup-opposition activism in many LGBT advocates’ work. Members of the LGBT community, including activists, are obvious targets for right-wing violence.

About The Americas Blog

The Americas Blog seeks to present a more accurate perspective on economic and political developments in the Western Hemisphere than is often presented in the United States. It will provide information that is often ignored, buried, and sometimes misreported in the major U.S. media.